Thursday, November 10, 2016

Join the resistance in D.C. on January 20, 2017/Whether Trump or Clinton Wins the US Election, The Rest Is Up to US

Join
the National Campaign for Nonviolent Resistance in an Inaugural Action on
January 20, 2017. No matter who becomes president the war machine will
continue, and so we need a strong presence in D.C. for the inauguration to call
for an end to all warfare, including drone warfare. NCNR is organizing an
action of nonviolent civil resistance on the day of the inauguration, Friday,
January 20. Some of us will be risking arrest, and we need others there
in support and solidarity. We will meet in the lower level food court at
Union Station at 10 AM on the day of the inauguration for our final planning
meeting. We will have a final planning meeting knowing we have to keep
things fluid because there is no certainty as to what will happen that day.

The idea
will be to process as near as possible to a checkpoint and make us visible to
the crowds. Then perhaps we can do a die-in. We will have model
drones, coffins, signs, banners, and leaflets to get our message across.
If you have ideas on messaging, please share over email. We want to call
for an end to all wars, and condemn the use of killer drone strikes.
Again, this will be a very fluid experience, and we will come together and make
decisions as we go along. Contact Max at 410-323-1607 or mobuszewski at Verizon
dot net.

Presidential
elections are a form of madness that comes over us once every four years. They
fit the great-man or -woman narrative of history, seducing us into forgetting
how powerful we are. They erase our memory of grassroots power, direct
democracy and civil society. Leaders beget followers; people pin their hopes on
one person, and with that they seem to shed responsibility for anything beyond
getting that one person into office. Or, they wash their hands of any further
involvement if it’s not their one person.

We forget
our own influence, the innumerable times we’ve swayed outcome

And so it
is this time around. With the election a matter of days away and the media
engrossed in a fight to end all fights, it sometimes seems as though we’ve lost
sight of the powers that belong to us and not them, and the responsibilities
and possibilities that go with our power. The intensely personal nature of this
campaign – and the particular danger of Donald Trump – has created a kind of
tunnel vision.

Which is
not to say that the outcome is unimportant. Far from it. Many Clinton
supporters seem quietly confident of a win. I am less complacent. We’ve had
enough surprises this year – in Britain, in Colombia – to know that voters have
a way of confounding those who observe them. A Trump presidency would be a
terrible thing. But a Clinton victory would be far from an occasion to sigh
with relief, sit back and resume life as though the last few months had been a
bad dream. A Clinton victory, in fact, would be just a starting point for a new
kind of campaign.

A
politician is not a given. Each one is in part what we make them, by pushing,
blocking, pressuring, encouraging, fighting, reframing, emphasizing,
organizing. Every election season we pretend that one person will have all the
power and that whatever they promise up front is exactly who they’ll be, for
better or worse. We forget our own influence, the innumerable times we’ve
swayed outcomes, such as the decision to veto the Keystone XL pipeline. We
forget the way culture and activism set the norms for political decisions on
matters such as same-sex marriage rights.

Election
seasons erase the memory of movements that worked for years or decades, outside
and around, below and above electoral politics. They drown out the histories
that matter: how women got the vote, how the civil rights movement progressed,
how the Free Trade Area of the Americas trade deal withered and died, how the
World Trade Organization was hobbled and its poorer member nations inspired to
revolt by the great 1999 shutdown in Seattle, how fracking got banned in New
York State, how rape law has been radically revised in many ways and places
thanks to feminist action and discourse. In all these cases, the people who we
mislabel leaders only followed the will of the people.

To
reiterate: it matters who is president, but what a president does has
everything to do with what the people demand or refuse or do themselves, and
what the House and Senate send them or sabotage.

Mitt Romney
promised to build the Keystone XL pipeline himself if elected; Republicans for
the foreseeable future will be puppets of the fossil-fuel industry. Democrats
are not necessarily our friends or allies, but they are sometimes politicians
who can be pushed. Obama wavered on that pipeline for several years. When he
vetoed it, it was not because of who he is, but because of who we are, we the
members of a climate movement that organized, educated, campaigned, blockaded
and demonstrated for years, building a powerful movement.

That the
president has become so much more engaged with climate is a result what the
movement did: it educated us on the science, made the case for the urgency and
importance of action, built global coalitions, shed light on the ways climate
is an economic and racial justice issue, started innumerable campaigns to block
pipelines, divest, implement efficiency and good design, and shift to renewable
resources. A lot of other changes that matter have happened at the local level
as cities, regions and states have done great work on climate, led by community
organizers, small groups and minor politicians you’ll never hear about.

The Obama
administration could have done much more if more of the people who elected him
stuck around to push back against the corporations, well-organized
conservatives and big-money interests. Which is not to even raise the question
of that administration’s principles; it’s more useful to ask what are our own,
if most of us do little or nothing about policies we deplore or ideals we
praise.

The same
will be true of a Clinton administration, if that’s the one voters choose on
Tuesday. The extent to which it serves the interests of people and our planet
depends in part on the extent to which citizens apply pressure to it. You may
feel exhausted right now; tired of a bruising cycle which has left no personal
stone unturned (often to the detriment of policy scrutiny). But the truth is,
we’re at the beginning – either of a period of sustained resistance against a
racist, misogynist, deranged climate-denier – or a period of sustained action to
push the first female president to deliver a genuinely progressive,
climate-conscious agenda.

If we end
up with a Democrat (and I regret that that’s the best choice we get in this
binary election), a lot is up to us. That’s a gift and a responsibility. I’ll
take it. I hope you’ll join me.

"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives."
Eugene Victor Debs